


The Thinking Man's Goddess

by nonky



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 05:00:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11821740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonky/pseuds/nonky
Summary: It offended him hearing people discount her mind because she was so good at using her body. Kara liked sex without particularly liking people. She was a natural pilot, but that didn't mean she hadn't put in the intellectual hours to earn her place.Luck swirled around her, but no one lived her life without having skills. It took a lot of mental stamina to risk her life all day, land her plane and be back out at the triad table after a quick shower.





	The Thinking Man's Goddess

Lee knew everything people said about them. At first it was just the combined rumours, because he genuinely couldn't ignore how public his life became once he was CAG. He tried to adjust his behaviour. He was polite and friendly, but only with the pilots did he ever act human. He had to be seen as an authority figure.

Kara listened to him more than she listened to most people, and his credibility rose like a lost balloon. He didn't have any kind of control over where it got off to, but it was out in the world. She was infamous, even before humanity was decimated. Her vouching for him had the potential to help and hurt his cause.

He and Kara apparently acted like old friends, or old lovers. People saw a connection there, but they had names for it that carved into a neatly edged thing. Lee knew better. His feelings were his own to carry, and the ones for Kara were big and awkward in his arms; sometimes turning into a glowing warm package the size of a ring box he could hide in a pocket.

It offended him hearing people discount her mind because she was so good at using her body. Kara liked sex without particularly liking people. She was a natural pilot, but that didn't mean she hadn't put in the intellectual hours to earn her place. 

Luck swirled around her, but no one lived her life without having skills. It took a lot of mental stamina to risk her life all day, land her plane and be back out at the triad table after a quick shower. 

Gradually, people saw his preference for her as a weakness. They noted every time he allowed her a little more insolence. They watched for sniping remarks during briefings. There were side bets and score cards. 

He could have fixed it by marrying her, if they'd been able to marry before she moved to New Caprica. Married people were generally assumed to be acting in shared goals, and expected to have fights. It was serious, sacred, and treated with some degree of respect. 

Lee stopped thinking for a single night, and he slept well on a dirty ground with Kara collapsed naked at his side. When he woke up, months later seemingly, Kara had married badly and so had he. Dee was wonderful and he didn't deserve one day of her efforts. Sam tried to be good to Kara. 

It could have hung together, two separate lives branching off and the old connection healing to something appropriately fond. He and Kara were in a years long argument fought with aroused eyes and harsh words that never touched the burning issues. They fought every few days, one another or Cylons or some horrifying loss of life. The adrenaline never had a chance to sink to anything normal. 

And Gods, yelling at her was almost as good as frakking her or holding her softly to feel her shaking off trauma. He knew her height because of the tilt he had to make to catch her mouth with his. It was very complicated with her and Dee, and his father overseeing all of it like having to live with Zeus down the street hearing every sharp word from your wife and your Kara. 

Mistress was the word, but it was too jaded for what it feels like, and nowhere near catastrophic enough to evoke the mess. 

People caught on, most of them too beat up by Cylons to care a whole lot. Lee knew they thought it was an obvious, stupid mistake on his part. 

If he were in a position to bicker with hecklers, he'd explain it was actually incredible amounts of effort to be the requited love of one wonderful woman and the sometimes jilted love of another glorious woman. If they thought Kara flew circles around him outside the ship, they would buy tickets to see it in a room with a bed. There should be an oil painting to commemorate the times Kara managed to decimate him with a whisper - not even an insult, just words she meant only for him to hear.

It could be a lost myth of Apollo, that though he was god of sun he met a goddess of volcanoes. That he had been intoxicated by her heat so similar to his own but concentrated and difficult to hold inside. The goddess gave fair warning she was not safe and would not change to a gentle goddess of meadows. Do not build cities too close to her feet, because eventually she would spill wrath and bitter loss. He had wanted to be near her despite his own danger, and lingered at her lips to give her company. That he sometimes tried to give himself completely and threw himself into them without care of living to do another thing. 

And he knew what it was to be so sweetly, lovingly preserved by rejection, because the goddess lifted him from her own fire and set him safely away - his body seared and his heart scalded with her tears. Apollo's choice to make the steep climb back to her lips would make more sense that way, a trial of a lover instead of a fool's inability to see his failure. 

It explained the noble certainty of holding Kara for momentary bliss, condemning himself over and over. It explained why their surplus of love never saved them from their failed attempts. 

Her smile was the symbol of Lee's faith. His religion was the pursuit of seeing it flare across her mouth again. He would never ask anyone else to renounce their gods.


End file.
